The Anthony Sutcliffe Award from the International Planning History Society recognizes the best dissertation in the field of planning history written in English and completed during the two years preceding the conference. There is no restriction on topic, but submissions that most directly and innovatively address the internationalism of the modern planning movement in line with much of Sutcliffe’s work are especially welcome.

"This dissertation is a very detailed and deeply researched submission, opening up fields seldom explored by the academy so far. The focus on non-official Soviet planning and design experimentation is surprising and provocative, and the work on Ernst May and other actors of the time is magnificent. There is also an incredible work of compiling documents from archives in Azerbaijan, Canada, Russia, and the US, and a deep reflection on the role of architecture and city planning in the USSR. The number of new windows opened up is absolutely impressive."

Students in the "Mastering the Archive" seminar will be presenting in Session 1 of the sixth annual Atlanta Studies Symposium, held at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University on April 20, 2018. Come hear their excellent presentations from 9:30-11:00, Rose Woodruff Commons Conference Room, 10th Floor of Woodruff Library.

The theme of the 2018 symposium is “Atlanta: City + Region.” The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) projects that the 20-county Atlanta region will grow by 2.5 million to more than 8 million people by 2040. Around 8% of ARC-forecasted growth will occur within the current City of Atlanta boundaries. We cannot plan for this growth without considering the historical context of the city and region, including policies determining—and sometimes limiting—the flow and connectivity among people, jobs, cars, and other transit options through the region. Having this context creates a platform to discuss lessons learned from the past and present to plan for regional growth in a more equitable and sustainable way.

My Spring 2018 course for undergraduates--The Architect + the City--was featured in an article in the Emory Report. It has been a truly fun course to teach, and the students have been wonderfully engaged. It shows in their pithy article quotes!

Student discussion leaders get the class talking in The Architect and the City. Emory Photo/Video.

My Spring 2018 graduate seminar, "Mastering the Archive: Situating Atlanta in the Interwar Housing Debates" was highlighted as a cool course in the Emory Report. The seminar focuses on my new home of Atlanta, the site of the first “slum clearance” project in the United States, in 1934, and America's first completed — though segregated — federally-funded public housing: Techwood and University Homes. Using these projects for research, students gain facility working in Atlanta-area archives through theoretical and historical readings and discussions and hands-on work and workshops with archival specialists. The seminar seeks to plot Atlanta on the interwar architectural map, establishing the city’s role as a clearinghouse for European social housing ideas in the U.S., and as the earliest homegrown precedent for the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal public housing. The students come from Art History, History, and even Emory's Goizueta Business School. It promises to be an intense semester; I'll report back on the results through my Research page.

The Redesigning Gridded Citiesbooks are out, including one on Chicago by Joan Busquets and me! Thanks to Harvard GSD Chicago urban design studio participant, now DDes student, Dingliang Yang, the four books--on Barcelona, Chicago, Hangzhou, and Manhattan--are complete, published, and now available on Amazon:

"When the monument to Lenin was taken down on the Freedom Square in September 2014, the question arose: how to rethink and redesign the square, a place highly significant for Kharkiv's visual image, a world-famous monument of the 1920s and 1930s architecture and urban planning?...

"On November 2, 2016, the Kharkiv city council announced a 'blitz open competition' for a new monument to be situated on Freedom Square. This competition violated the law in several ways: it was announced as charitable (the winner would not receive a prize), the type of competition was not specified (even though the character of the place calls for an international competition and an international expert jury), and the competition's call for submissions contained neither the essence of the problem to be resolved, nor the criteria by which submissions would be judged. There were no public hearings regarding the fate of this place. Just three months later, on February 3, 2017, the winning submission was announced: an 86-meter decorative column, topped by an angel with a cross, which crudely destroys the unified historical appearance of the square. This winning project has countless analogues in the world while its originality and artistic value are doubtful, to say the least. Kharkiv city residents have already called the project 'odoroblo,' which in Ukrainian means 'a monster.'" ...

I'm pleased to participate as a design juror on final reviews at Georgia Tech School of Architecture. Former Harvard GSD classmate, Jen Pindyck, has been guiding her 2nd year MArch students in their analysis of, and intervention in, Clarkston, GA. Clarkston, just east of downtown Atlanta, became a Federal Refugee Resettlement Area in the 1908s, and is now known as the most diverse square mile in the United States. At the midterm, students pitched architectural, landscape, and inventive programming ideas to bolster the existing community and draw visitors to the city. I look forward to seeing what the second half of the semester brought.

I am happy to be participating in the Landscapes of Housing Mellon Colloquium, Harvard University, Friday, October 14, 2016. I'll be giving a talk entitled "Afterlife of a Model Socialist Settlement" on the panel, Housing, Landscape and the Post-Socialist City, which asks how socialist residential landscapes have fared in the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. It promises to be an intellectually stimulating day, with presentations by practitioners and scholars that will explore the relationship of landscape and housing worldwide.